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Acxiom pitched US gov't on surveillance project

03.02.2006
In November 2001, Acxiom Corp. proposed to the U.S. Department of Justice that it conduct an Internetwide surveillance of Web sites touching on topics such as "abortion, racial superiority, politics, religion, immigration, and foreign affairs," using technology designed to extract business contact information from dot-com sites.

Information about the proposed surveillance was included in documents released Thursday by the Electronic Privacy Information Center. The documents stated that information thus obtained could be used for both terrorism-related data analysis and an "Identity Verification System to be used by airlines, rental car agencies, and other business and government agencies."

The research proposal, jointly authored by Little Rock, Ark.-based Acxiom and the University of Arkansas' Department of Computer Science, was released to EPIC this week as a result of a 2004 Freedom of Information Act request.

In it, Acxiom described a process for crawling the Web, collecting information, parsing it for "marker words and phrases," and extracting data such as names, titles, phone numbers, and e-mail and mailing addresses. Such information would have been sifted, indexed and, in the words of the proposal, "made available to the proper authorities for further action."

According to the proposal, the system would continually crawl the Web seeking sites using "marker" words appearing in specific patterns. The proposal lists sample words in categories such as verbs (including bomb, kill, burn, kidnap and hijack), buildings, places, people, organizations, racial epithets, titles and "suspicious words" (such as explosives, bomb, jihad and kamikaze). Identification and contact data would also be gathered. A sifting function would validate the data against previously established facts and rules. Once validated, data would be entered into a database for official use. The proposal requested a total of US$1 million in funding for two years.

The documents indicate that Acxiom's proposal was delivered to the Justice Department by Congressman Vic Snyder (D-Ark.) in late 2001. Michael Chertoff, then assistant U.S. attorney general, responded by mail in June 2002, thanking the company for the proposal and noting, "We have been in contact with a variety of computer companies, including Acxiom Corporation, and are well aware of its impressive technical capabilities."